The 24-hour lead up to this stream was frenzied. Yesterday, AOC didn’t even have a Twitch channel. She had appeared on Twitch before as part of Brewis’ 2019 stream in support of trans rights, but never on her own channel, nor to play games. But as soon as she expressed interest yesterday, mobilization was startlingly rapid. Big names like Hasan Piker and Pokimane, who featured in today’s stream, immediately volunteered to help. So did a truly enormous number of other Twitch stars. Twitch itself immediately got involved, as evidenced by the fact that AOC’s channel is verified and named, well, “AOC.” (Twitch no longer allows normal users to create three-letter account names. These, according to three sources speaking to Kotaku on the condition of anonymity, have to be repossessed from old inactive users or created by Twitch admins.) Shortly after, fellow rep Ilhan Omar’s team also began exploring the idea of streaming on Twitch.

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What followed, according to sources, was an effort on the part of AOC’s team to procure necessary streaming equipment and figure out how an AOC Twitch channel would even function. Who would she play with? How would her team approach the tall task of moderating her chat, an element of Twitch that can get extremely rowdy in its best moments and downright racist and sexist in its worst? The latter was an important question, one that, streamer and activist Jordan Uhl told Kotaku in a DM, led both AOC and Omar’s teams to consult “with top streamers and other experts in the community to quickly adopt best practices while respecting the guidelines they must abide by under the First Amendment.” (Kotaku reached out to AOC’s team for more information but, as of this publishing, did not receive a response.)

They could not simply follow in the footsteps of other politicians who’ve streamed on Twitch, like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. What AOC aimed to do was fundamentally different. Sanders and Trump have effectively stranded themselves on their own little islands, rebroadcasting rallies and panels and treating Twitch as an extension of preexisting campaign efforts. Twitch, however, is a community platform, one built on personalities and chat interaction. Put another way, there’s a reason why Piker is far and away the biggest leftist on Twitch—not internationally famous politician Bernie Sanders. From the get go, Piker collaborated with preexisting Twitch stars while injecting his own flavor into the proceedings.

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AOC, unlike literally every other politician and extension of the U.S. government, evidently recognized that, putting out a call to streamers and industry experts rather than trying to reverse-engineer another slick, tediously sanitized streaming operation. This meant that she immediately had a gargantuan audience of people who actually wanted to watch her stream. But she still couldn’t just behave like any other streamer. She is a government representative, which means that wantonly blocking rowdy chat users could constitute a First Amendment violation. To wit: In 2019, AOC ended up settling a lawsuit filed by Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who accused her of violating the First Amendment by blocking him on Twitter.

More recently, AOC sought to prevent the U.S. military from funding recruitment efforts on Twitch, something legal organizations like the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University (though notably not AOC) argued against by saying that the Army and Navy violated the First Amendment by banning viewers who asked critical questions about war crimes. This forced the Army and Navy to publicly publish revised rules that included strict procedures around timing out and banning users, and even then, only when viewers engage in harassing behavior—not questions or criticism. AOC’s measure ultimately did not succeed, but she still inextricably became part of that discussion.

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AOC’s team, then, ended up yesterday rushing to consult with experts and put together a moderation team with the knowledge and savvy to navigate these extremely choppy waters, with that team formulating detailed rules of their own. Originally, it seemed like AOC was going to go live for the first time last night, but in a particularly relatable moment for anybody who’s ever tried their hand at streaming, getting set up took a very long time. After viewers and mods waited in chat for a few hours, AOC eventually tweeted that she “spent tonight setting up accounts, mods, streaming & run throughs” and she was “hoping to go live tomorrow night.”

All of which culminated in Tuesday night’s stream, which by most measures took over Twitch. It is abundantly clear that AOC has cracked the code on Twitch in a way that far outstrips attempts by other politicians and public figures. Will it translate to votes in any meaningful way? Will she continue streaming regularly? Will people continue to care? And what are the broader ramifications of the sort of parasocial relationship Twitch can engender when it involves a politician who, no matter how relatable, is a public servant first and foremost? How might this kind of relationship interfere with people’s ability to consistently hold politicians accountable, a necessary evil of our deeply flawed political system? These questions, for now, are impossible to answer, because all of this is unprecedented.

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But clearly, all eyes are on AOC, and imitators are inevitable. Case in point: Shortly after AOC signed off, Piker pointed out that libertarian politician Justin Amash is already trying to get up to speed on Twitch. AOC and others will learn from this stream, and one way or another, we’ll get answers to those questions.

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